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McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: hallowedthings on April 28, 2012, 05:03:24 AM
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I've been doing a bit of world building for my new UF city. I've come up with a bunch of factions I'd like to use, but I decided to scrap them after I started to wonder how plausible they all are. It seems that most UF stories have their critters split up into neat groups with obvious leaders, but I can't imagine this happening in real life. Not that it ever could happen in real life, but, you know :P
It's believable that these creatures would need some way of keeping each other in line (resulting in some kind of authority/structure), but it's unlikely that they'd do this based on species. For example, vampires are vampires, so why are they split up into courts? It would make more sense for all of them to work together to keep up the masquerade. And so on. It seems unlikely that -- after centuries of co-existing -- the supernatural world would have such a fragmented structure. (This isn't about the Dresden Files btw, but UF in general. I'm only using Jim's vampires as an example :) Lots of other stories, like Illona Andrews' series, etc have similar factions)
I'm just trying to figure out whether or not it's actually believable that these clear-cut species/ability-based factions would exist within a city. What do you think?
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Humans split into some pretty weird factions, races might have some social norms but its not implausible to have them only share a single commonality (ie: geographic location, mutual love for David Bowie etc etc).
What I'm putting together has factions, but they are mostly goal related rather than race/species related.
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I think Madd has it. If your creatures still have human attributes it would be harder to believe that they wouldn't split into factions than that they would. Just to use Humanity as an example the earliest splits seem to fall along family lines and such splits were often necessary when a group of hunter gatherers got too big for a given area to support them all. You see this even among animals, especially predators. One of the reasons for marking and defending territory is to prevent too many hunters from taking all the prey from a given area. This would make sense if your creatures (e.g vampires) are predators.
Early agricultural societies would have this same problem. There is only so much territory. Whether you want to hunt from it, gather from it, farm it or graze it, it will only support so many people.
You get disagreements about government and leadership, disagreements about religion, disagreements about religious government and leadership. Should it be a monarchy or a dictatorship or a democracy? Capitalist, socialist, communist, or facist? Should we raise sheep or beef? Corn or cotton? Do people of every race get the same legal rights? What about half-bloods or lesser percentages (in societies where all are not equal)? What about women? We humans are endlessly inventive when it comes to things we can disagree about. If your creatures are human based, there will be factions unless someone is powerful enough to control them all.
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Wow, thanks! I never thought of it that way. So it is realistic after all. I think I'll include these factions in the end, then :) I was just a bit worried that people would call me out on them or something.
Thanks a lot!
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Groups can split on all different kind of lines.
Political, religious, financial, ethnic, size, age, gender,
strength, families, the list of possible groups is endless.
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And that's assuming you are only talking about one species on competition with itself. You have different animals all squished together with different but overlapping needs and you have an ecosystem to work with. Werewolves probably would tend to a territorial pack hierarchy, but there could be several packs near each other if they have reason enough. Vampire may be all Victorian Court style, or just as easily fit a solitary hunter motif, or rodent like sewer goblin. But were the wolves may naturally form into packs, maybe vampires are solitary predators (the Cats to the wolves Dog). Maybe the Lizard People in that are mistaken for sewer alligators can have a more complex society since they stay out of new tunnels and thus the human eye most of the time.
One good thing to look at is the "peace" of organized crime. Its some of the most Darwinian corners of society around, and shows how a bunch of widely diverse groups can coexist. It depends on the "business" of each, and in a fantasy setting you just have to look at it with monster needs in mind. Mobs in a city tend to stake out territory in terms of geography and/or product. Street gangs that do intimidation rackets and the petty crime stuff, but may not get into drugs or gambling or prostitution. Likewise the drug dealers probably don't care who is robbing jewelry stores, as long as they Mind Their Own Business. You could well have ecosystem like that. Maybe Werewolf packs are the thugs, and each have a neighborhood, and brawl like you'd expect. Meanwhile the Vampires run the drugs, but have a truce with the wolves in exchange for Red Cross Blood Drives (which goes to hell when the next Alpha steps up). Maybe there is a small school of Sirens out by Pier 13, but they don't really bother anyone else, and sometimes will distract border patrols for friendly smugglers. Arms dealers could probably care less whats happening on the streets, unless that is their market.
One of those things with UF you have to think about is what force is keeping the supernatural out of the public eye. Is it a Masquerade, some conspiracy between all supernatural factions, and if so what made them all agree to get along? Is it the combination of technological disruption and subconscious human disbelief that keeps humans from noticing? Is there a secret government cover-up, some Men in Black agency that swoops in to invalidate and steal the camera footage? Personally I'm a fan of the Fall of the Black Court; the idea that one of the superpowers was nearly annihilated by what from their perspective amounts to a horde of chickens, and all the rest are afraid it will happen again.
But Oz makes a good point. Sometimes all it takes is simple food supply. Running with that thought, it doesn't make natural sense for predators to compress and cooperate in any degree in a city like that. Rather they would either consolidate the city as a single, particularly bountiful territory, or else they would go out into the wilderness to get the isolated prey that has not concentrated itself for herd protection. But in the modern age, as society has developed and communication has become so ever present, it would have reversed the situation: in small rural areas, Taken Prey would make much more of a stir than in a crowded city where the prey are killing each other every day. Survival would push them to enter the cities and blend in, the proverbial Wolf in Sheeples clothing. That would probably chaff the longer lived of the supernatural predators, imitating their prey instead of maintaining the pride of yada-yada...
Anyways, many ways to take it, depends on what you want it to do for you
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Whether you like the Sookie Stackhouse books or not.
Charlaine Harris does do some nice things with her shifters.
The Werewolves consider themselves sort of the top of the shifters
but woe to anyone who calls them a shifter. (They're the bad ass biker types almost.)
Patricia Briggs in her Mercy Thompson series has given her werewolves a very specific
heirarchy and different sets of behavior for alpha wolves and the lower wolves.
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Groups can split on all different kind of lines.
Political, religious, financial, ethnic, size, age, gender,
strength, families, the list of possible groups is endless.
And I would say it would be more odd for groups NOT to split into factions especially in a violent UF world. think about modern day gangs. You don't hear about someone being a Blood and a Crip.
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And I would say it would be more odd for groups NOT to split into factions especially in a violent UF world. think about modern day gangs. You don't hear about someone being a Blood and a Crip
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i've always found it weird that all members of a race were part of the same group. In anita blake every single werewolf pack seemed to have more or less the same culture and terminology, ugh.
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I have to admit that I have gotten tired of "packs" of werewolves. I liked the idea when I first heard it and I still enjoy the Mercy Thompson and Kate Daniels books but for the most part I feel the idea is now worn out. Everyone that writes werewolves now seems to think that it has to be part of the story. Give me back the story of the lone man either good or evil, cursed or with a spell, able to control regular wolves or not, and maybe or maybe not in control of himself. Give me an urban fantasy where every third person you meet is not a were (or other supernatural) and where pack politics don't occupy a third to half the story. That's one of the many things that I like about Jim's weres. The closest he has to a pack is a group of college friends that like to hang out together and if there's any talk of alphas and hierarchy it takes place off screen.
Sorry about the rant. It's been building for a while.
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I always like the lone werewolf concept. A pack of werewolves seems counterproductive. A werewolve is supposed to be the bad guy! [sorry jim - heh]
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I always like the lone werewolf concept. A pack of werewolves seems counterproductive. A werewolve is supposed to be the bad guy! [sorry jim - heh]
Fair enough. Mostly it comes from the fact that wolves innately form packs. In nature the Lone Wolf motif indicates a wolf that has been driven from the pack for one reason or another. The usually either die or find a new one.
But Natural and Supernatural need to be different by definition, so changing that trope makes sense.
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Fair enough. Mostly it comes from the fact that wolves innately form packs. In nature the Lone Wolf motif indicates a wolf that has been driven from the pack for one reason or another. The usually either die or find a new one.
But Natural and Supernatural need to be different by definition, so changing that trope makes sense.
There are ways. But really you have to decide what you want and how your world needs to be constructed so that its plausible. You can do it.
The DEposed King
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Is anyone else reading DD Barant's Bloodhound Files ?
They take the underlying logic of a world with lots of supernaturals in and run in a quite different direction with them; they're set on an Earth with only a million or so regular humans left, because all the rest of the population of the planet are either vampires or a werewolves. (Except for the golems.)
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Is anyone else reading DD Barant's Bloodhound Files ?
They take the underlying logic of a world with lots of supernaturals in and run in a quite different direction with them; they're set on an Earth with only a million or so regular humans left, because all the rest of the population of the planet are either vampires or a werewolves. (Except for the golems.)
INteresting. Does that make Humans a domesticated Herd animal?
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INteresting. Does that make Humans a domesticated Herd animal?
Nope; in that setting it makes them a tiny and peculiar ethnic minority.
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I read the first book. I had mixed emotions but thought it was definitely worth reading the second book. It had interesting potential. I forgot. It's been long enough that I need to reread the first book before starting the rest. I will have to do that soon.
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I read the first book. I had mixed emotions but thought it was definitely worth reading the second book. It had interesting potential. I forgot. It's been long enough that I need to reread the first book before starting the rest. I will have to do that soon.
I kind of lost track of them for a while, and was surprised to discover just a couple of weeks ago that there are now five out.
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So uh I know I'm kind of necroing a topic and I apologize but I just started reading the first Bloodhound Files book and I am liking it ok, except the main character keeps identifying people as werewolves and then later as Vampires and vice versa... is that some kind of unreliable narrator thing or just a mistake? On the train near the beginning in Japan she identifies the detective as a Japanese Vampire and then a few pages later describes his wolf form. I thought I was confusing characters but I checked and it's definitely there.
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So uh I know I'm kind of necroing a topic and I apologize but I just started reading the first Bloodhound Files book and I am liking it ok, except the main character keeps identifying people as werewolves and then later as Vampires and vice versa... is that some kind of unreliable narrator thing or just a mistake? On the train near the beginning in Japan she identifies the detective as a Japanese Vampire and then a few pages later describes his wolf form. I thought I was confusing characters but I checked and it's definitely there.
She's unused to the world and really no good at telling vampires from werewolves, and often gets them wrong on first meeting, is how I read that.
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Factions could exist, but who says they have to be all made up of one type of supernatural entity.
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Factions could exist, but who says they have to be all made up of one type of supernatural entity.
Wonderful point, I suppose they could group based on location or common desire/religon/belief or any other ole thing people have created factions around
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This exact point influenced my world-design for Locked Within. The two primary factions, the Council of Chains and the reborn Conclaves, are separated by conflicting ideologies first and foremost.